Posterous

Almost no learning curve. Excellent for mobile blogging. Includes options for a paid domain name, right within sign-up process. Great for beginners. Integrates well with social media.

Cons
Light on page elements. Can't preview when posting by email. Controls are fairly light or require CSS knowledge?not much in between.

Bottom Line

Posterous, a free blogging platform, is an ideal place for beginners and microbloggers to get their feet wet and post rapidly. Experienced bloggers should stick to some of the more difficult-to-master tools that offer more control.

Posterous is a free blogging platform that simplifies the process of designing and maintaining a blog. One of its signature features is that it lets you post to your blog from any email account or mobile device, so prolific bloggers can add new content all the time, quickly and easily. Whip out your smartphone, tap out some ideas into an email, send it to the special address that Posterous provides, and you've just updated your blog. If you attach photos, Posterous will resize them for you. You can post from an iPhone or Android app. You can even post via text message.

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Another way Posterous sets itself apart from other free blog services, such as Tumblr (free, 3 stars), WordPress.com (free, 4.5 stars), and Google's Blogger, is that it integrates exceptionally well with other forms of online social media and social networking, letting you sync it with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and even other blogs you manage on other platforms, including Xanga, Typepad, MovableType, and Drupal.

As powerful as Posterous can be in terms of interconnectivity, it delivers on its promise of being incredibly simple, making it an ideal platform for less technical users. To Posterous' credit, more advanced users can still access much of the code that powers their blogs, letting them tinker deeply with the look and feel, although average users will find a lack of ready-made page elements and other options, especially if you've gotten a taste for all the goodies that Blogger includes. Still, Posterous succeeds in keeping its tools and interface simple, while gently guarding some of that terrifying code from anyone who doesn't want to see it.

Sign Up and Dashboard
Like most other free web-based services, Posterous requires nothing more than an email address, username, and password to sign upalthough you don't even have to go that far if you don't want to (but you'll want to). There's an option to skip the sign-up process and instead start a blog by sending an email to post@posterous.com. The subject line will become the title of your post, the body copy will become the text, and any image or audio attachments that are included will be automatically resized or formatted to fit the blog. Posterous will reply to your email with a confirmation message when the post is live. It'll set you up with a URL, but don't expect it to be pretty, for example: jill-sg33y.posterous.com. The post will expire, though, if you don't create an account.

A better way to start is to create an account from the get-go so you can choose a URL (free if it ends in posterous.com), establish a profile, and learn about some of the features and services that Posterous offers. One such service is importing a blog from another site (discussed in more detail in the section "Switching to Posterous" on the next page). Another is registering a domain that does not contain "posterous.com," for a fee. Blogger allows you to use your own domain but sends you off site to take care of the legwork. I adore that Posterous offers to handle this for you for $24.99 per year (or $129.90 for 10 years) with 50 email addresses included, and full legal ownership and DNS control given to you. Wordpress.com will also help you register a domain name for about $17 per year.

Posterous' main user dashboard seems extremely simple and straightforward, but in actuality, it took me a good 15 minutes of poking around before I felt like I was truly familiar with it. The dashboard, also known as the "Manage" page, provides a summary of the activity that's recently taken place on the blog. If you haven't created or imported another blog yet, there won't be much to see at first, but eventually the dashboard will show you a list of posts you've created as well as the total number of site views your blogs have racked up. Down the left side are buttons to create a new blog, manage settings, register your own domain, and import an existing blog from another site. Along the top, a set of tabs lets you move between Posts, Pages, People, and Autopost. The center area is reserved for titles of recent posts, their publish dates, and buttons for editing, deleting, tagging, or autoposting them. And the lower portion of the screen shows options for posting (by email, web, mobile phone, Twitter client, and more), as well as an oddly titled "Actions" area, where you can dive into adding a theme (look and feel) to your blog or delete a blog.

Jill Duffy is a writer and senior analyst, specializing in productivity apps and software, iOS, as well as apps and gadgets for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on...

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